Venture

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  1. *returns from Cayman Islands*

    What'd I miss?
  2. My main's opinion of Statesman can be found in an interview I wrote in response to a "writing challenge" in the Virtue forums many years ago. Cat Stevie, also of Virtue, has a similar outlook. (I really, really need to update and just plain redesign my CoH pages.)

    With a few exceptions (another interview for the same "challenge"), my characters never "looked up" to Statesman and won't be any more (or less) affected by his death than they would be by the death of any hero.
  3. Quote:
    But honestly, even given the number of times Statesman has been captured or sealed (all of which were only temporary) none of them resulted in the loss of his power or immortality.
    Yo dawg! First arc of the Top Cow comic! Statesman had his powers yoinked just like every other super in Paragon City and then he got killed. Killed hard enough that Numina couldn't resurrect him until Manticore used a very risky move to bring him back. That's recent.

    Hell, the man knows what Sapper guns are, right?

    Quote:
    No matter how well the writing goes, suspension of disbelief is partly a skill, and partly a gift of the imagination that not everyone has.
    The audience is only required to suspend disbelief, not hang it by the neck until dead. H. G. Wells, one of the fathers of speculative fiction, observed that the reader will accept a single fantastic element but not a second. Decades later John W. Campbell would say "I'll swallow one porcupine but not two." Strictly speaking a superhero setting has used up its porcupine at the word superhero. The audience is not required to make allowances every time the writer feels like phoning it in.

    I assure you I have no lack of imagination: I can imagine much, much better stories than this.

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    Walking into a trap you know exists because you're confident the trap is one you can handle isn't arrogance.
    It sure as hell is. It's almost the definition of the word.

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    Uhhh, no. Deus ex machina means he got a magic "I win button" that came out of thin air to solve his problems.
    Which is exactly what he did.

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    Hmmm...but would he be thinking clearly when his daughter has been killed?
    If he wasn't, he'd have been dead a long time ago.

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    Deus ex machina is 'ghost in the machine' in French.
    "God out of the machine", in Latin. Used originally to refer to a contraption used in ancient Greek theater to hoist actors playing celestial beings over the stage.

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    Yes we as an audience get to be genre savvy but most of these problems have solutions that could be solved instantly even without being genre savvy.
    Never mind that, notice how time travel conveniently leaves the stage, especially after Wade was considerate enough to spell out everything he's done. "Oh, Cimerora..." *opens Ouroboros portal* "...seen you earlier, dude..."
  4. Quote:
    Wade had 10 years to plan, set a trap, and chose the place of battle. The end.
    Paraphrasing Chandler, the easy plan to stop is the one that was 10 years in the making, the one someone tried to get very cute with. The hard plan to stop is the one the guy thought of two minutes before he put it into motion.

    Let me put it to you this way: in the thirty years or so that I was an active GM, I don't think a single one of my players would have fallen for this. I'm including the 10-12 year olds I introduced to the hobby.
  5. I was informed yesterday that despite the fact that the arc throws a metric ton of filter errors in the editor that it actually loads. You just have to deal with Hydra instead of the custom mobs.

    I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do about it. I'd rather not take the arc down but I really don't want people playing it either. And no I'm not going to accommodate the filter; there's nothing profane or infringing in it. (Hilariously, the Twilight parody mobs are not affected by the filter.) For now I'm going to slap a warning in the description while I think about it.

    Edit: Or not, forgot I can't republish it with filter errors in place. Oh well.
  6. Quote:
    We are presuming that Statesman didn't suspect something was coming and had some plans in place in case he actually did perish.
    ur doin it wrong. The point is that he shouldn't even have been there, shouldn't have been giving Wade the head-on confrontation he obviously wanted.

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    On the other hand, Statesman was immortal and thus likely had no fear of what he felt Darren Wade could do, thus underestimated him and fell into the fatal trap.
    If so, he's a complete idiot, seeing as how he's been depowered and killed before -- recently, in fact.
  7. So much fail and so little time....

    Quote:
    It's only obvious because we, the players, and omniscient.
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Serenity
    Zoë: So... trap?
    Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Trap.
    Zoë: We goin' in?
    Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Ain't but a few hours out.
    Hoban 'Wash' Washburn: Yeah, but... remember the part where it's a trap?
    Kaylee Frye: But how can you be sure Inara don't just want to see you? Sometimes people have feelings. I'm referring here to people.
    Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Y'all were watching I take it?
    Kaylee Frye: Yes?
    Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Did you see us fight?
    Kaylee Frye: No.
    Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Trap.
    A man with no real powers went out and killed the daughter of the most powerful hero in the world. Statesman would have to actively try not to turn Wade into a red smear on the ground in a confrontation. It does not take the strategic acumen of Sun-Tzu to see that Wade has a trick up his sleeve and is OBVIOUSLY trying to provoke a response. Actually giving him that response is USDA certified Prime Grade-A stupid. If we were talking about an "ordinary" hero I might let this pass as "reasonable stupidity" if it was the only fly in the ointment (it isn't), but not from Statesman. The guy was a soldier and international criminal mastermind for about 20 years before starting his 80-year tenure as a superhero. If he was actually this dumb he'd have died a long time ago.
  8. Agreed; but changing Recluse for the better involves the words "bullet" and "brain".
  9. Quote:
    On another note, speaking of redemption, why is Lord Recluse evil? What made him turn evil? What was the falling out him and Statesman had? I always thought the guy wanted to conquer the world but now I am not sure if he can be "redeemed."
    He was evil to start with. He was friends with Cole when the two were international art thieves. Cole was only in it to find a cure for his mustard gas poisoning; when he found it (the Well) he went straight. Richter didn't. The idea that he can be redeemed is a complete joke.
  10. Quote:
    Something that I just cannot seem to understand is why...WHY...do people get so caught up in "the well this" and "the well that".
    Because whether you like it or not, that is what the story is.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by The Jargon File
    In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
    “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
    “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
    “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
    “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
    Minsky then shut his eyes.
    “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
    “So that the room will be empty.”
    At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
  11. Map after map of the most miserable, unfun faction in the game so you can watch Statesman go down like a chump.

    Someone over there actually thought this was "epic"?
  12. Again, I'm pressed for time so this will be limited:

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    But does that mean you can't create a concept or story that does incorporate these points?
    Yes, we can handwave away what we don't like. The problem is that we have to.

    What's more, in a very real sense, you can't handwave away what you don't like. Yes, you can make up whatever you want and if that's what gets you through the night baby, whatever. But gluing feathers on a rat doesn't make it a swan. The canon is what it is. The story you've made up in your head to make it palatable has no currency here. It means absolutely nothing when we're evaluating the quality of the work.
  13. I feel like playing the game tonight instead of arguing about it, so I'm only going to answer two points right now.

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    They're not really problems - they're just stories that not everyone likes - kinda like all stories
    If it is someone's position that there is no such thing as bad writing, that everything is just a matter of taste, then that person is saying we can't tell the difference between Shakespeare and Stephanie Meyer. That person is then, QED, a moron.

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    Venture fancies himself a writer.
    No. I fancy myself a critic. To be a writer someone, somewhere must have paid you to do it. I've never even tried to get published. There's a great quote I read a long time ago and can't track down the provenance of right now: "if you can't outdo Dostoyevsky, we don't need you". I've always believed that even before I read the quote. I'm not going to write the next great American novel and the world doesn't need one more purveyor of mediocrity. I'm sure I can write a better novel than the aforementioned Ms. Meyer but really, who couldn't. (Whether or not it would sell better is another matter, but again you'd have to be an idiot to correlate popularity with quality.) I'd have to be really desperate for money before I'd try earning any that way.
  14. Quote:
    Well to be fair in the story that featured her, A Scandal in Bohemia, she was offed off-screen on the first paragraph even though she ultimately left an impression on the fans.
    The only indication that she is dead is the use of the word "late". That's pretty thin soup.

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    Seeing as how her death didn't seem to be a big motivational move for Holmes or big character developing moment, was it fridging?
    I'd say yes, it was done just to torque off Holmes (and, likely, the audience). She got greased like a scrub just to show off Moriarity's villainy.

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    He grabbed for her hankercheif, then let it go later.
    For Holmes, that's practically an emotional breakdown.
  15. I saw the movie today. Overall I liked it. I recently re-read a volume of Holmes stories (free on Kindle) and I think they did a good job of adapting the canon.

    The one thing I did not care for was Irene getting fridged. She was too good a character to be thrown away so casually. I know some people are playing up the ambiguity of her death (technically we only hear Moriarity's account of it), but I can't imagine that he had her in his clutches and let her slip away, or that if he was holding her as a hostage he wouldn't have used her as leverage against Holmes. Her death isn't a certainty but it's the way to bet; I think any attempt to use her in a subsequent film would be not very credible.
  16. Quote:
    One problem with this idea.

    CoH Earth isn't RL earth.

    For one thing, CoH Rhode Island is bigger than RL Rhode Island, due to the massive earthquake that opened up new real estate and of course, revealed the CoT.
    That dog won't hunt. If the map of the United States is radically different then that needs to be explicit: they have to supply the new map. Furthermore, you simply can't change the map enough to accommodate the geography in this case.

    Oh, and as for Rhode Island being bigger, that's just a weak excuse for Did Not Do The Research. They just started cramming things in without paying any attention to the geography.
  17. Quote:
    The selling history is only 5 transactions long if you only take an immediate snapshot of it and then stop watching. Anyone truly serious about analyzing market trends in WW would watch the real-time transactions as they appear and keep their own data log. If you don't care to do that, then you don't really care about tracking real market traffic and computing usable trend data.
    As it turns out, adding bad data to bad data doesn't make it good data.
  18. Quote:
    Setting aside the fact that the US coast isn't a straight line and I'm sure there's a way to jigsaw that map so it works, that comes off as an immensely egotistical thing to say,
    Knock yourself out. Google Earth is cheap and readily available. Go find a spot on the east coast of the US that's NW of Bermuda, just outside US territorial waters and allows you to place the Rogue Isles so that the east edge of the chain is closer to the east coast than the west edge of the chain.

    We'll wait.

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    especially since some of us think your 'corrections' are a load and that the writing staff is a lot better than you give credit.
    No one can deny you your gods-given prerogative to be wrong.
  19. Quote:
    Lol I hope you know you're commenting on writing you haven't read and therefore have no idea what you're talking about.
    Actually, that would be you. Gameplay and Story Segregation. Your entire argument is absurd. If Paragon City really had people getting mugged by superpowered thugs on every street corner 24/7 no one would live there. Those spawns are a concession to the fact that the game is an amusement park, not a simulation.

    Furthermore, you are completely missing the point that Thierry doesn't have one. He is obviously insane and is portrayed as such. There isn't a response option that even remotely looks like "hang your head in shame and admit he's right"; they're all variations on "what a horse's patootie".

    As for the street spawns, the best way to deal with them would be to remove them outside of hazard zones. They're a misfeature included to support an outmoded style of play from fantasy MMOs. However, if we really need an "in-universe" way to deal with them, just offer a series of badges for rescuing street crime victims. 15 minutes after that goes live you'll never see another one again.
  20. Quote:
    Considering that's all of ONE source that contradicts the game, and that map isn't referenced at ALL anymore (as far as I'm aware), I'd say the map was a screw-up and was phased out with most of the population unaware of the mistake. Besides, it's easy to believe there was a miscommunication between story and art that was just never cleaned up.
    As has been pointed out, the map is in-game and has been since i6. The mistake was pointed out back then, too, by lots of people.

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    But you'll use any excuse to prove the devs wrong, eh?
    If they weren't wrong so often I wouldn't have to correct them so much.
  21. Quote:
    This. I know for a fact I read that at least part of Nerva belongs to the US, which is why there's a complete base out in the open (read: the only place Longbow has BUILT a base in the isles that's secret to no one).
    Nerva is supposedly contested territory. The i7 PDF says:

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Prima i7 Guide
    The outer islands have seen more habitation, and eventually they grew into Crimson Cove, a “protectorate” on the outskirts of U.S. territorial waters. The town is heavily occupied by Heroes and Project Longbow, but since it is outside the Rogue Isles, Lord Recluse and his agents have quietly made it known that independent operators who ply their trade there will be looked on favorably.
    The fly in the ointment is the map of the Rogue Isles. Quick, what's wrong with this picture?
  22. Quote:
    How? You must know it's 2012 by now
    CHECKUARY (n) -- 13th month of the year. Begins January 1st and ends when you stop writing the previous year on your checks.
  23. Yeah, got caught flatflooted myself by the end time. I'd wanted to get slow resist IOs for a bunch more characters but couldn't stay up any later last night to get the last few done. (I was getting one per Lady Winter run with my main.)
  24. Quote:
    I am saying the concept of showing what prices people have been willing to buy at, ie any selling history at all is more useful than the concept of showing what prices people want to sell for.
    False. The 5-sale limit only provides the illusion of information. Since it's so easily manipulated it's actually worse than useless.
  25. Add slots to Reading Comprehension, then.